What are sustainable practices that expand and promote our vision of freedom? This course will focus on installation and community engaged art practices in conversation with diverse media and the local ecosystem. The thematic focus of the seminar will critically engage in the question: How can we create a dynamic practice in which to pursue and create artistic, agricultural, ecological, and socio-economic equity? Aware of our daily investments in settler-colonialism, how will we in our practices steward this land with seven generations at the forefront?

Making Dances 2 will build upon students' prior study of dance composition. The studio will be our laboratory as we identify and engage the tools of choreographic process, individual kinesthetic and aesthetic impulse, the relational nature of the art form and the negotiations these relationships engender (choreographer/performer/audience/community/place/identity), as well as the inherent societal implications of making art of/for/by the expressive body in space and time.

Europeans frequently made images of the sacrificing, butchering, and devouring of bodies when imagining the Americas. They depicted people as cannibalistic monsters. But as many in the Americas have recognized, cannibalism is also a powerful model for a decolonizing form. Cannibalism, as cultural ingestion, is a model in which one is nourished by the other's strengths while excreting that which is of no use.

In this combined technique and theory course, students will engage in the practice of Haitian dance, and support this embodied learning with study of Haitian artists, history and culture. Bi-weekly physical practice introduces students to the foundations of Haitian dance, and reading, writing and discussion familiarizes students with both important Haitian dance artists and history, and related topics in Haitian studies (the Haitian Revolution, Vodou religion, migration).

The aim of this course is the comparative study of four ancient epics from Mesopotamia, Greece, India, and Ireland. The core readings comprised: the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Mahabharata, and the Tain. Each text is considered both in its own historical and cultural context and in the larger shared context of ancient epic, myth, religion, and literature.

Given the importance of letters to the Latin American colonial enterprise and nation-building project, literature is a privileged site to think through contemporary rhetorics of modernity, decoloniality, and neoliberalism. We will begin with the critique of modernity by Borges and Cortazar and then turn to the temporal dislocations introduced by Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, Jamaica Kincaid, Manuel Puig, Garcia Marquez, Diamela Eltit, Pedro Lemebel, Juan Vasquez, and Samanta Schweblin, as they confront the pressures of the marketplace and imagine alternative knowledges and socialities.

All designed objects share one thing in common - they are engineered interactions between objects and bodies. While each wholly unique, the central connection between all artistic and creative practices is the human experience. "Non-disciplinary design" is a set of critical philosophies and practical processes that define the act of design, before these acts become disciplinary. It identifies a foundational framework for understanding and applying design theory, as well as building a heightened capacity for creative agility and transformative, interdisciplinary work.

This course is an examination of the emergence, development, and dissolution of European modernist art, architecture and design. The course begins with the innovations and collisions of early twentieth century art, created in consort with the growth of modern urbanism, industrial production, colonialist politics, and psychological experimentation. We end with the cooptation of modernist radicalism in the wake of World War II.

This course provides an opportunity for students to discover what research practice can look like for those working in film, photography, video, installation, and related media. Readings, screenings, creative exercises, library workshops and artist talks which address conceptual approaches, working methods, and a range of research strategies will allow students to deepen their research skills as they develop projects of their own.

Modern-Contemporary Dance Technique 3 is an intermediate-level class, which will build on students' previous study of modern dance technique. The studio will be our laboratory for a semester-long exploration of a wide range of modern dance concepts with a focus on deepening sensation, clarifying points of initiation in the body, expansive use of space, connectivity and increasingly complex phrase work. Along the way we will give continued attention to alignment, spatial clarity, breath, increasing range of motion and the development of strength and stamina.